Last night I finally caught the season première of True Blood. True Blood is something of guilty pleasure to me so I didn’t really feel any urgency to watch it live but I’ll definitely watch if I’m up at 2 in the morning and it’s on. After watching the show I wanted to get the reactions of others who follow the show more closely and may have caught something I missed or has a unique insight into the show. My first stop was Racialicious where they hold a round table who live blogs the show and has great commentary, this however stuck in my craw a bit.

Tami: So…they’re going for the murderous closeted gay man/gaysexual predator combo? For all the kudos this show gets for diversity, it sure treats marginalized people like shit.

The KKK Chapter in Georgia feels like they’re discriminated against. They’ve been denied an “Adopt A Highway” program in Georgia because of their history, ideology, and the fact that not too many people really want them around. The Daily Intel‘s Dan Amira has the rundown with the whiniest KKK quotes possible from April Chambers.

“I don’t see why we can’t (adopt the stretch of highway),” she said. “Would it be any different if it was the Black Panthers or something? Someone always has some kind of race card.”

We are through the looking glass here people although it should be no surprise that even people who voluntarily decided to join the Ku Klux Klan feel as if they are the real victims. It’s the perfect incident to view the inversion of actual grievances into a political, and publicity tactic in order to insulate from actual criticism or charges of racial bias. We’ve reached the point where the “the only racists are reverse racists” movement has moved beyond parody.

Projection and the trivialization of racial inequality continues apace. Since the height of the Civil Rights Movement there has been a backlash that has taken the thought that black people have just been “playing the victim”. This line of thinking has led many to believe that legitimate concerns are just tools to be deployed to cow opposition which has been adopted wholesale by conservatives in order to advance their agenda. This cynicism in the face of legitimate suffering has impeded the ability of our nation to move past inequalities that persist to this day.

What can these people do to damage their credibility. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney suffers no backlash for embracing and fundraising with Donald Trump who openly questions whether the President is an American. Ron Paul published racist newsletters throughout the 90s and he’s also a politically viable Presidential candidate who must be listened to and taken seriously. Why is it open association with racism doesn’t disqualify people from running for the highest office in the land. What’s more troubling is the cynicism with which this is discussed. Race-baiting is just another tool in the American mailbox to be deployed and debated as if there are no real world consequences to American citizens or I guess Americans of any importance.

Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins wrote about the conservative obsession with incidents of black on white violence and their efforts to paint the narrative of a race war being propagated by black people on white people. Conservative talkers such as Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh along with conservative media outlets like The Drudge Report, The Daily Caller, and others have been looking for any incidents of violence perpetrated by black people upon white people and amplifying them during the Barack Obama presidency with the implication that the election of President Obama has served as some signal to Black America that now is the time for some sort of crude revenge. Coppins goes into detail even getting a sort of admission from Tucker Carlson of The Daily Caller who delights in his attempts to leverage fear to get back at “liberals” who are concerned about racism. None of this is new however. In the 90’s Rep. Ron Paul ran a newsletter preying upon the fears of roving bands of black youth attacking white people even going so far to teach readers how to buy and dispose of a gun in case they have to kill a black youth. This fear that the advancement of rights and achievement of Black Americans will directly imperil white lives and purity is evident as far back as D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”. While Griffith makes his point nakedly how different is Limbaugh’s declaration “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering”

We had a great show tonight on the topic of college and its value. We also had some thought-provoking input from our audience. If you missed it, you can listen to it by clicking the play button below. If you listened live, you can listen to “The AfterShow”, which featured TheKingsLaw, ChadStanton, and yours truly towards the end. Thank you for your continued support, and be sure to hang with the Threaders next Monday at 10pm Central.